This tip, from Activities, Games, and Assessment Strategies for the Foreign Language Classroom, by Amy Buttner, provides you with a version of Connect Four that you can play with your students while helping them gain confidence in their ability to define and conjugate important verbs!

Objectives: Students conjugate verbs in any tense chosen by the teacher.
Materials: Connect Four Grid, colored markers

Activity Directions and Preparation Hints
Play this game as a class, in small groups, or in pairs. You need a game board that is at least six rows wide and five columns tall. Use this game board or create your own. The object of the game is to be the first team to get four correct answers marked in a column, row, or in a diagonal line with their team's color. Students should strategize to block the other team from connecting four in a row. For whole-class play, divide students into two teams. Have a copy of the game board on a transparency or drawn on a whiteboard. Have two colors of markers, one color for each team. The students must start at the bottom of the grid and work their way up as if stacking building blocks.

In the case of a game that practices verb conjugation, the first team reads a subject and a verb from the chart and then conjugates it. If the conjugation is correct, the teacher writes the conjugation in the corresponding space and in their team's color. The next team chooses their subject-verb combination as well and conjugates the verb. Decide whether the opposing team can steal the space if they can provide a correct answer when the first team loses their turn for giving an incorrect answer. To involve more students in he game, pass out individual whiteboards. Each student should write an answer down for the question being asked, even if it is not their team's turn.

Applications and Modifications
Use any vocabulary, grammar, content-based or cultural topic that fits with a grid set up.

Sample Topics

• Form basic yes and no questions with the subject and the verb.
• Practice noun-adjective agreement with gender and number by putting a noun in the rows and a adjective in each of the columns.
• Practice possessive adjective and noun agreement.
• Form a sentence by putting a subject pronoun and an infinitive in the row and a place in the columns. Students have to conjugate the verb and connect the place to the sentence with a logical preposition.

Download the Connect Four game board!